Use Email Marketing to Get Sales Leads
Email marketing is still one of the best ways for small businesses to get sales leads. You can build your own email list of customers and prospects and cultivate them through e-newsletters and special offers. You can also send outbound email to highly targeted lists of new sales prospects. If you're ready to move beyond the occasional "e-blast," then let's talk about developing an email plan that will start generating leads.
Goals & Planning
J. Walker Marketing will help you define your marketing goals, identify your target audiences, and develop an implementation plan. This will include planning how your existing email addresses should be used, how you can capture more, and what systems will make your program easy to manage.
Connect & Activate
Your email marketing program may link contact forms on your website with your CRM system to ensure leads get captured, tracked and nurtured. We'll also import current email addresses, pick email design templates and get ready to deploy.
Create & Deploy
Strong marketing content is critical so we'll work with you to plan a content calendar, write and design emails or e-newsletters, and plan special offers. Then we'll help you test and modify your first email before you press "send." The last step is tracking results. J. Walker Marketing can be beside you every step of the way.
Your program will be integrated, trackable and effective
​
Email marketing works best when it functions as an integrated part of your whole marketing plan. That’s why we’ll embed contact forms on your website and be sure that contacts you get through email marketing flow into your CRM system. You’ll also get access to reports showing exactly how many leads you’re getting. And all of our programs are compliant with the CAN-SPAM act so you can be sure that user privacy will be safeguarded.
​
To get you up and running, we'll work with you to understand your goals, assess your current activities, and then plan and activate your new program in these steps:
-
Discovery and data import
-
CRM configuration, email deliverability, and activation of lead capture form
-
Marketing planning meeting; campaign and email set up
-
Content calendar; copy/design of your first email
-
Campaign assessment and review
Email marketing is more than just "blasting" out a message. It's about nurturing and acquiring new customers.
​
“Email blast” has become shorthand for email marketing. But getting the most value from email marketing depends on more than just designing a message and blasting it out.
First, it depends on creating or acquiring, a high-quality list of recipients. These need to be people who have opted-in to receive messages and they need to have the profile of potential customers (or at least influencers).
Next, messaging needs to be truly relevant to the wants and needs of recipients. Too many marketers build email content calendars based on the need to have sales events to hit revenue targets. Sure, we’re all bound by the need to make money, but email marketing is going to be most effective when it does more than shout discounts. Perhaps your customers and prospects want information about how to select one of your products, news about technology or novel ways to use your products or services. If every message you send is all about buying, recipients may start to unsubscribe. Show them that you’re in a relationship, show them that you care and demonstrate that you know something about them. Content that does this gets opened, read and shared.
Think about how you can use marketing automation to help you manage and track your efforts to acquire and nurture new customers. What if you could seamlessly get new opt-ins to your email newsletter, send the right variation of your message to different prospects based on their needs, and track all this activity in your CRM (customer relationship management) system? Well, you can. That’s where the power of marketing automation amplifies your efforts while reducing your work.
We often help clients create customer acquisition and nurturing programs using Zoho. Zoho is a cloud-based suite of software offering modules for email marketing, CRM, marketing automation, and other critical marketing functions. My partner for the technical parts of Zoho implementations is Node 9, run by the talented Dave Stauffer.
We often recommend Zoho because it's well suited for smaller businesses that don’t want the cost or complexity of Salesforce, Pardot, or other enterprise-level marketing automation platforms. It’s affordable, easy to use and it features capabilities that many higher-cost platforms offer.